Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints, “Ar...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, homeschoolers, and literature scholars.

Hannah Arendt
b. 10-14-1906; Hanover, Germany
d. 12-4-1975; New York

Hannah Arendt, who described herself as a political theorist and not a philosopher, dealt with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. In addition to publishing numerous books, she reported on the post WWII Eichmann trial, and taught at the university level.

Hannah Arendt quotes ~
• “Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.”
• “Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.”
• “Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
• “Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
• “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

Ludovico Ariosto
b. 9-8-1373; Reggio Emilia, Italy
d. 7-6-1533; Farrar

Poet Ludovico Ariosto is best remembered as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso (1516) which is a witty parody of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France.

Ludovico Ariosto quotes ~
• “Nature made him, and then broke the mold.”
• “Man proposes, and God disposes.”

Aristophanes
b. ca. 446 BCE; Greece
d. ca. 386 BCE

The playwright Artistophanes is known as the “Father of Comedy”. In his well known play Lysistrata (c.411 BC), the title character and her followers refrain from intimate relations with their husbands until the opposing armies declare peace.

Aristophanes quotes ~
• “A man's homeland is wherever he prospers.”
• “By words the mind is winged.”
• “The wise learn many things from their foes.”
• “Hunger knows no friend but its feeder.”
• “These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.”
• “You should not decide until you have heard what both have to say.”

• Aristophanes: The Complete Plays

Karen Armstrong
b. 11-14-1944; Wildmoor, Worcestershire, England

Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, is a former Catholic nun.

Karen Armstrong quotes ~
• “Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.”
• “Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.”
• “There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.”
• “Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.”
• “Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.”

• History Posters

William H. Armstrong
b. 9-14-1911; near Lexington, Virginia
d. 4-11-1999; Kent, Connecticut

Children's author and educator William H. Armstrong is best known for his 1969 Newbery Medal-winning novel, Sounder.

• dog posters

Bettina von Arnim
b. 4-4-1785; Frankfurt, Germany
d. 1-20-1859; Berlin

Though best known for her friendships with famous men such as Goethe (with whom she corresponded), Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms, Bettina von Arnim was a writer, musician, and artist exemplifing the Romantic era. It is possible she was the “Immortal Beloved” of Beethoven.

She collaborated with her future husband Achim von Arnim, and brother Clemens Brentano, on a collection of folk songs that were later put to music by Gustav Mahler.

Von Arnim was also a social activist who published several dissident works advocating progressive ideals. A community founded by progressive immigrants from Germany founded the short lived community of Bettina, Texas.

• Immortality by Milan Kundera

Matthew Arnold
b. 12-24-1822; Laleham, Middlesex, England
d. 4-15-1888; Liverpool

Poet and essayist Matthew Arnold is known as a “‘sage writer’, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.” Arnold is also often called the third great Victorian poet, after Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning.

Before he was elected to Professor of Poetry at Oxford he supported his family as an inspector of Nonconformist schools.

Matthew Arnold was the son of educator Thomas Arnold and uncle of Julian and Aldous Huxley.

• Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

Antonin Artaud
b. 9-4-1896; Marseille, France
d. 3-4-1948; Paris

Antonin Artaud was a noted French playwright, actor & director.

Antonin Artaud quotes ~
• “When we speak the word ‘life’, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.”
• “There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”
• “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

• The Theater and Its Double, Artaud